There was an article in Fast Company by Liz Funk last week on situational awareness that you may have seen. I’ll link to it below, but I want to point out a few great points (and mistakes) that they made.
They said that, “Your gut is this collection of heuristic shortcuts. It’s this unconscious-conscious learned experience center that you can draw on from your years of being alive,” she explains. “It holds insights that aren’t immediately available to your conscious mind right now, but they’re all things that you’ve learned and felt. In the moment, we might not be readily able to access specific information, but our gut has it at the ready.”
This is an incredible statement, and there’s a lot of truth in there, but it leads people to false conclusions about personal safety…and almost everyone in the world of self-defense misses one critical point: The accuracy and effectiveness of your gut instinct depends on the information that you feed it.
Your gut instinct is not just based on what you’ve learned and felt, but also what you’ve experienced, thought, watched on TV, read, and trained it to do…regardless of whether that training was on purpose or accidental.
As an example, many people are creeped out by clowns and subconsciously assign a clown a higher threat potential than the average person they run into. This is due to self-talk, conversations, and readily consuming media that shows clowns as threats. As a result, their “gut” sends them warning signals when clowns are around, even in cases where they’ve never been harmed by a clown and the clown in front of them is not a threat.
Other people believe that everyone is inherently good, can be reasoned with, and will behave nicely if someone just takes the time to understand them. As a result, their “gut” doesn’t tell them that someone is a dangerous and immediate threat, even when they are.
Feed your gut accurate threat profiles and your gut will protect you. Feed your gut inaccurate or random threat profiles and it will give you inaccurate and random alarms. Let friends and mass media feed your gut instinct and it’ll be a complete mess.
The article talks primarily about using your gut to make better business decisions, but there’s something that you need to know about your gut that applies to both personal safety and business decisions:
Your gut like the status quo and is comfortable in a rut…even a rut that’s harmful to you.
Any time you have a choice between an option that’s comfortable and familiar vs. an option that’s new and different, your gut will push you towards the comfortable and familiar until you retrain it.
Unless you are in control of your gut, it can miss obvious dangers, send you false alarms, keep you in bad relationships, encourage unhealthy habits, and keep you from making positive changes in your life.
One of the tips that she gives is to give yourself constraints. This is great. Funk/Leone suggest that when you have a tough or big decision, set a time limit for how long you have to make up your mind. In the business/personal world, this may be something like half an hour or an hour.
In the personal safety world, it means leaving the area, assessing a potential threat more completely, or setting if-then triggers like, “I’m going to cross the street. If they match me, I’m going to switch directions and cross back to the original side and escalate as necessary to deterrence or defense based on their response.”
Next, she suggests that you be aware of your feelings. She suggests that you do this to get in touch with what your gut is saying. I agree 100% that you should do this, but you need to master your feelings rather than letting your feelings master you.
Any time you’re stretching your limits—like rock climbing, sky diving, force on force training, asking a girl to dance, holding your breath under water, public speaking, taking a risk in business, pushing limits with physical fitness, showing someone something that you’ve created, etc.—pay attention to the discomfort that you have. It’s your body telling you that you are in danger and might die. Your body will use this feeling to keep you from doing all of these rewarding things. Do them anyhow.
If you die, you probably shouldn’t have done what you did. But if you don’t die, you’ll probably feel incredible. The sooner you associate breaking through the horrible feeling with the awesome feeling you get afterwards, the more likely it’ll be that you’ll keep having awesome breakthroughs in your life.
You’ll also teach your gut to only warn you when you’re facing real danger instead of constantly sounding false alarms whenever anything slightly uncomfortable presents itself.
In short, your gut instinct is more like a dog than a magical crystal ball. Just like a dog, your gut instinct will cause all sorts of problems if it’s not trained and disciplined.
But also, just like a dog, if you spend just a little bit of time training your gut instinct, it will do the “tricks” that you want it to do, be an asset rather than a liability, and warn you about dangers in your environment.
How do you do this…how do you train your gut instinct to REALLY keep you safer rather than just give you a false sense of security?
The short answer is that you feed it accurate and precise threat profiles.
The simpler, more precise, and more accurate they are, the easier it is for your subconscious to continually scan for them.
Here’s an example of what NOT to do…if you train your gut to look for knives and bumps that might indicate a concealed pistol, your gut is going to be sounding the alarm quite frequently on good people who are responsibly armed, and who aren’t a threat to you or anyone else who doesn’t pose a threat to them.
What do you look for? One of the best things is hands…
Most acts of physical violence involve the use of the hands.
Are they soft, dainty hands or rough, tough hands with callouses on the knuckles from punching things?
Are they gloved when it’s inappropriate?
Are they holding a weapon?
Are they clenched into a fist or repeatedly clenching and relaxing?
Is the right hand in a jacket pocket with something pointing at you through the jacket?
Is the hand quickly going under the shirt and inside the waistband in a threatening manner?
Is the hand hidden behind the leg or back?
Is one hand swinging and the other hand held straight down against the body?
This is just one set of simple threat profiles to look for. Add in a few more and you’ll easily be able to detect and avoid the vast majority of violent attacks.
This is something that you might be able to piece together on your own. Kind of like you might be able to piece together how to build your own parachute or your own airplane if you really wanted to.
But most people that I know would rather use something that was created by experts and tested (by someone else) under real-world, life or death situations.
And that’s why I want to strongly recommend that you check out the Avoid, Deter, Defend course from retired Navy SEAL, Larry Yatch. It takes real world skills that kept him alive on extended solo & 2 man missions as a SEAL in hostile countries in urban and rural areas detecting and avoiding fights is what kept him alive. This isn’t theory. The fact that he’s alive is proof that it worked for him.
And it’ll work for you and your non-tactical loved ones too. Larry created this training with not only defensive shooters and law enforcement in mind, but also their spouses, kids, and parents who may not be as switched on or skilled at martial skills.
Learn more now by clicking >HERE< And when you order this week, we’re going to include 6 special bonuses for defensive pistol use and training!
And if you want to read the original article from Fast Company, you can do so by going here
